Racial Meaning Making in 4K: An Ethnographic Collective Case Study

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 58
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Scholarship: Confronting Forms of Oppression in Early Childhood Pedagogies

Abstract

The current study explores children’s racial meaning making and the impact of differing approaches to the topic of race in two early learning environments: Discovery and Elm 4K. Although Elm and Discovery differed in context and instructional approaches to the topic of race, children’s racialization processes unfolded similarly as racial systems were reproduced across classrooms. As racial actors, children related to one another through dominant paradigms of race, constructing shared systems of racial meanings used to organize their social lives. Instructionally, children’s racial realities—what it meant to be a White, Black, Asian, Latino or Multi-racial—were largely ignored. Instead, situated in whiteness ideologies, classroom instruction provided little opportunity for children to relate to one another differently.

Author

• Erin Quast, Illinois State University